Game Theory And The Golden Punishment Rule

Moral sciences are back. Natural laws of ethics, envisioned early in the Enlightenment, can now be studied. Scientists are relearning the wisdom of old traditions by objectively rating their performance. And they’re suggesting improvements: any rule system is weaker without “The Golden Punishment Rule.”

Humans, being social, can’t live without rules. Certain rules work better. Game theory provides “behavioral telescopes” to study them.

The naturalistic fallacy says we can derive no ethical lessons from nature. But without seeking good and evil in nature, we can compare the productivity and sustainability of behavioral rules—and map negative ethical spaces, which are inherently unworkable, and thus inherently bad.

It’s still early in the use of game theory, but it seems the behavioral universe has gravity-like pull towards certain stable high productivity social rules. We should use our “active intellectual powers” to adjust what’s deemed rational, and to more intelligently design our economic and political (once called moral sciences) systems.

Illustration by Julia Suits, The New Yorker Cartoonist & author of The Extraordinary Catalog of Peculiar Inventions.

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